Flashback-A Brief Story

Reposting my old fanfic here, I wanna save it.

The worst part was, he wasn't even the youngest standing in that line. As the intimidating man in the dark green uniform passed his position, he cast furtive glances left and right. Three from his left was a boy who could hardly be ten. Five to his right, a boy perhaps twelve at most. The quivering body next to him was a certainly not a man. He shut his eyes tightly for a moment, willing reasons for these facts out of his head, ready to put on a bold face as the uniformed man drew near once again.

He couldn't tell, sitting on that plane, if the vibrations running up and down his spine were from the engines or his fear. Small pools of vomit ran up and down the grooves on the floor as it soared onward to oblivion. Some of it was his own. He was stiff. It had felt as if he had been sitting in this spot for days, in this cramped, smelly steel bird. It wouldn't be, it couldn't be much longer. Part of him wished he would be able to stay there forever. A larger part of him wished this was just a dream, just a terrifying nightmare he would awake and be free from. He wondered if the others here with him were thinking similar things. It was sleepless on that plane. There was no comfort, no quiet. It wouldn't be, it couldn't be much longer. He and the other boys were replacing their fathers. He and the other boys were going to war.

His face was suddenly splashed with warmth, his vision going red, eyes stinging. He crouched down even farther into the trench, face against putrid mud, and wiped the blood of the boy once beside him from his eyes. He thinks his name was Rick, but he never could make out what he was saying; from day one in this place his ears rang constantly from the unceasing eruptions. This was the fourth boy they had lost since the last dawn. It was becoming easier to continue with his duties while standing next to corpses. He choked the nasty feeling this realization gave him down into his arms, lifted his rifle, and fired blindly into the mists and smoke of the field before his eyes. That night, he thought he saw the red-flares for the first time.

The odor was sickening, quite literally so. The bodies of his comrades were left where they fell, rotting in the trench alongside those still drawing breath. He tried to cover the ones with maggots as best he could with mud. He longed to raise his head into the smog-filled fresher air, yet he knew he could not dare to do so, lest he join the bones. His arms were beyond what he would have thought he could endure at one time, a time frighteningly distant in his mind. The raising of the rifle, the pulling of the trigger, these were reflex now. The red-flares were much more frequent now, distant but coming closer each day.

He began to feel utterly alone. This is what hell is, he thought. Had he already died? No. The itching, infected scratches on his face and arms made that clear enough, for they still sometimes seeped with life-fluid. He thought he could hear comrades down the line in this accursed hole in the muck, shooting and screaming from time to time, but he could not see them for the fog. Or was it smoke? They were one and the same to him now.

He had not actually seen the bane of his countrymen. They were always distant, across a wretched, cratered field, obscured by smoke. But this dawn he saw them. He saw them well. They were men, and boys, and shapes he could not recognize. Advancing. He allowed himself to weep the first time he could remember since day one here. Defeat began to creep into his spirit. He could hear planes.

As they passed over-head, his vision burst with bright red light. A red-flare erupted not three feet in front of him. He shielded his head with his battered, numb arms. But there was no pain. He opened his eyes once again as a shadow came over him. He blinked. He was looking at a giant ball, an ugly tainted white on top, mud-caked crimson from the middle down. It took up almost all of his vision from its close proximity to his young face, peeking above the trench. It rocked violently towards him before righting itself, struck by something surely fatal to a boy. Slowly, deliberately, it rotated towards him, formless and a perfect sphere. Before he realized it, he was looking into a face. Beady black eyes stared back at him, a bullet hole almost perfectly between them. A crooked smile shone at him from near the crimson bottom of the ball. Time felt like it stopped. Was he hallucinating?

There was a soul behind these little black eyes he stared into. This was his last thought before the ball lunged forward, powered by a force he could not discern. It crushed into his ribs and sent him sprawling to the bottom of the putrid trench. When he rose once again to peer over the edge, the sphere was rolling. Rolling away. Rolling fast towards the advancing enemy. It exploded, a flash so bright it blinded him, an eruption so loud it deafened.

Vision of the present came back to him as his last uttered words finished echoing in his head. The words that always brought on these memories.



For all his forced bravado, for all his blatant lies of war-time glories in a distant land, in a distant past, these words were the truest he knew.

As Lt. Surge threw the Pokéball containing his beloved Raichu, he looked into the eyes of the hopeful youth challenging him at the Vermillion City Gym. He sincerely hoped that this was the only kind of battle this generation of young men would ever have to face.

~End